1972, USA
Jack Starrett was an incredible character actor (best known for playing three versions of the same unruffleable cop character in Richard Rush’s Hell’s Angels on Wheels, Tom Loughlin’s Born Losers and Bruce Kessler’s Angels from Hell) but also the director of some of the most idiosyncratic films of the counterculture indie heyday (my favourite being the Terrence Malick-scripted The Gravy Train, 1974).
The Strange Vengeance of Rosalie is an odd genre hybrid that sees travelling salesman Virgil (Ken Howard) duped into becoming the prisoner of a love-starved teenaged Native American girl (Bonnie Bedelia, looking shockingly young) at her remote shack in the California desert.
After an eerie opening scene in which she ceremonially buries her dead grandfather, backlit by the twilight and effectively scored by sporadic percussion (the only really appropriate use of music in the entire film), her loneliness becomes unbearable and the inhospitable landscape frightens her into trying to find company.
But she’s young and unsocialized, having never been to school, and only going into town occasionally to get supplies.
As she points out later in the film, “no one knows about this place, and consequently, no one knows about her; she is not only a marginalised person, she’s practically invisible.
In a sense, she’s like Kobo Abe’s Woman in the Dunes – now all she needs is a mate.
Out on the road hitchhiking, she gets picked up by Virgil, who is on his way to Los Angeles to catch a flight for a long-anticipated vacation.
As the sky turns dark, he agrees to take her down the dusty unmarked road that leads to her grandfather’s ‘ranch’ (although it’s really a tiny, filthy shack with no doors or windows), where she proceeds to let the air out of his tyres, and break his leg with the butt of an axe in order to incapacitate him (this scene in particular has led many viewers to compare it – unfavourably – to Stephen King’s Misery).
With Virgil immobilized and bedridden, she begins a bizarre game of courtship in which she tries to convince him to fall in love with her, and he tries to manipulate her to get the hell out of there.
But where Misery‘s Annie Wilkes tries to hide her motivation from writer Paul Sheldon, deceptively telling him that the roads are closed and the telephones are out, once Rosalie lures Virgil to her ramshackle abode he knows flat out that she’s nuts and that she plans to keep him there as a prisoner until such time as he wants to stay with her of his own free will.
He begs her to get a doctor, warning her that he could get gangrene and his leg could fall off (“and then how would you feel?”), but she’s satisfied with the splint she’s fashioned for him.
“What do you know about broken legs?” he challenges.
She shrugs, unconcerned: “I fixed a chicken leg like that once” (thus referencing the source material, Miles Tripp’s 1966 book The Chicken).
Virgil’s vitriol for his captor is blatant – he calls her “a dumb half-breed Indian squaw” among other niceties, but their interplay is interesting because it borders on jovial bickering and at times one wonders if perhaps Stockholm syndrome isn’t setting in.
They are rousted out of their insular game by the appearance of a nosy no-gooder named Fry (squinty screen villain Anthony Zerbe) who – expanding on the plotline of Starrett’s earlier Cry Blood, Apache (1970) – has been hanging around Rosalie’s grandpa trying to find out where he hid his rumoured stash of gold.
Hearing of the old man’s demise, Fry gets rough with Rosalie in an attempt to pry the gold’s whereabouts out of her, and Virgil comes to her defence (even if all he can do in his current state is threaten Fry and offer to pay him off).
But as much as the audience – and Virgil – comes to sympathize with this disturbed girl, one can’t forget that she is dangerous, and she will do what she needs to in order to survive.
hexafu 